How the drug war has turned modern philosophy into pseudoscience
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 16, 2024
I have already explained in many essays how today's psychology reckons without the Drug War1. It ignores the insights that would be gained by taking drug effects seriously and so ends up disastrously shunting the depressed and anxious off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma 23 meds while dogmatically ignoring the obvious powers of a long list of drugs to elate and inspire. This mindset also helps justify the use of shock therapy for the severely depressed when such victims could have otherwise been cheered up in real-time with drugs like MDMA 4 , coca, and even opium - the nightly smoking of which is surely preferable to having one's brain fried5! Yet drug researchers like Robert Glatter profess to be uncertain whether even laughing gas could actually help the depressed6.
Could laughing gas help me, Robert? You're kidding me, right?
Such obfuscating materialists do not even dare to ask if the daily chewing of the coca leaf could help chronic depressives like myself7. It is more than their jobs are worth for them to ask such questions. For academics today are under the thumb of the Drug Warrior and know better than to promote treatments that use demonized substances, which the Drug Warrior insists can have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever. To insist otherwise is to kiss your research funding goodbye.
To repeat, then, modern psychology reckons without the Drug War and this has had disastrous results. I know this all too well, as this oversight has helped to justify draconian drug laws that have deprived me for a lifetime now of the godsend mood medicine that grows at my very feet.
And yet philosophy does the exact same thing. Modern philosophy also reckons without the Drug War. It too ignores the insights that would be gained by taking drug effects seriously.
Consider the conclusion of Immanuel Kant , that we can know nothing about the noumenal world, about "what is really out there," and that we have but one shared experience of the sensible world as mediated through the categories of thought8. Well, guess what? William James himself begged to differ. Under the influence of nitrous oxide, he came to the conclusion that our everyday "sober" consciousness which Kant is presupposing here "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.9" James concluded, moreover, that "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.10"
Yet disregard them we must, thanks to Drug War prohibition. We must hand the laurels in this philosophical contest to Immanuel Kant 11 because William James has been disqualified from even running in this race. Kant is right because the government says so. And are our philosophers pushing back against this prima facie censorship, especially now that the FDA has nitrous oxide in its sights as a drug to be demonized, the substance that inspired James's visions in the first place? Are they up in arms, petitioning the FDA on behalf of the freedom of inquiry and human progress in general?
To the contrary, most philosophers today seem to think that drug use can have nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy. In fact, the Harvard website does not even mention laughing gas in their biography of William James, the founder of their school of psychology and the first man in America to teach a course on that subject12. They have expunged James's "drug use" from history, just as most books about Benjamin Franklin refrain from telling the reader about his penchant for opium 13 . In the age of the Drug War, even our facts about the past must conform to Drug War orthodoxy, namely, the idea that psychoactive drug use can have no benefits for anybody, anywhere, ever.
This oversight is becoming increasingly inexcusable, however, as researchers involved in the psychedelic renaissance continue to remove the many layers of stigma that the racist Drug Warrior has strategically attached to psychoactive drug use over the last 100-plus years of substance demonization. But neither psychologist nor philosopher have yet to awaken from their "dogmatic slumbers." In fact, I have written on this subject to hundreds of American philosophers (real snail mail) over the last five years and never heard back from one of them14. Not one of them. I wrote to all the philosophers at Oxford about the UK's attempts to outlaw laughing gas, urging them to oppose the measure as an attack on academic inquiry, and no one responded15. Not one of them.
This is why I have concluded that the world is going through a new self-imposed Dark Ages, one in which science has willingly devolved into pseudoscience in order to conform to the requirements of racist Drug Warriors, who insist that drug use must always be thought of as a meaningless dead end.
Author's Follow-up: December 11, 2024
A note about the Inca use of the coca plant. It is true that coca candies and teas (etc.) are readily available for tourists in Peru; however, that does not mean you will actually have the Inca experience when consuming the same. The Inca -- and their descendants to this very day -- chew the leaf in large bunches and continuously, thereby extracting the invigorating alkaloids from the leaf, an effect that can at best be suggested or hinted at by candy chewing and the like.
Author's Follow-up: December 20, 2024
There are very few Americans who recognize that they have been brainwashed from childhood when it comes to "drugs." They have been taught to feel a certain way about them and to not ask any pesky questions. To paraphrase William Shirer in his book about Hitler:
"No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.
The government causes problems for those who are habituated to certain drugs. Then they claim that these problems are symptoms of an illness. Then folks like Gabriel Mate come forth to find the "hidden pain" in "addicts." It's one big morality play created by drug laws.
Wanna show drug warriors the error of their ways? Legalize all less dangerous drugs than alcohol and then deny work to those who test positive for liquor and confiscate their property if beer cans are found on-site.
I'm looking for a United Healthcare doctor now that I'm 66 years old. When I searched my zip code and typed "alternative medicine," I got one single solitary return... for a chiropractor, no less. Some choice. Guess everyone else wants me to "keep taking my meds."
"They have called thee Soma-lover: here is the pressed juice. Drink thereof for rapture." -Rig Veda
(There would be no Hindu religion today had the drug war been in effect in the Punjab 3,500 years ago.)
If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
We need a Controlled Prohibitionists Act, to get psychiatric help for the losers who think that prohibition makes sense despite its appalling record of causing civil wars overseas and devastating inner cities.
I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.
The FDA tells us that MDMA is not safe. This is the same FDA that tells us that "shock therapy" is safe.